I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Fit of the Week: Alpha Talwar

It's pretty easy to forget that missile ships can be volley ships, too. So many of us get so focused on gun volley damage that we overlook a ridiculous little ship like this one:

Small Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Hydraulic Bay Thrusters I

First things first: because this is a tight fit, this is an old character's play-thing. Brave Newbies like Talwars but they mostly like them because lots of cheap meta1 mods can be fitted to them with even cheaper rigs. You throw in a small pile of Nova Missiles (faction or otherwise) and when a bunch of them get firing, suddenly you have some 1200 volley damage Per Talwar. Short version, 50 or 60 of these means that you have sufficient volley on field to alpha through even relatively tough targets like HACs and battle cruisers. The DPS is even pretty reasonable, at 120 to 150 depending strongly on player skill and the exact meta of light missile launchers chosen. Don't choose particularly expensive launchers It's unlikely you'll live to bring them home.

The only difference between this ship and the Brave Newbies version is that this one tanks better... whereas a Brave Newbies Talwar dies to a single bombing run. They don't care; they're not proud.

After the missile launchers, damage assist mod and MWD, the next most important module is at least one rig improving missile flight time or speed, maybe even two of them. This is not a brawling ship. It has the sig radius of a small cruiser and the EHP of a frigate. It's not a good combination and it should try to stay out of range of damage, particularly HAC damage which can absolutely eat this kind of ship. The missile flight time rig combined with a Sensor Booster allows the ship to shoot missiles almost to the extent of its 72km lock range. Not many HACs can effectively counter-punch at that range.

After that, I've filled in with a MWD and the remainder of a tank, most particularly Medium Shield Extender and a T2 MAPC so that I can fit both it and the MWD. As implied above, this is the ultimate skirmishing ship; it should be fighting in the 45-50km range. There's no point fitted because the last thing this ship should be doing is tackling things. Therefore, a Talwar fitted this way is highly reliant on either close-range tackle, bubbles in null-sec, or -- daringly -- no tackle at all. With each Talwar doing 1200 alpha and enough of these little monsters on the field, your enemy might not realize that he's going to start losing ships until it's too late. This will take a small bit of timing on the part of your FC since like all volley damage, it's better if the volleys arrive together to minimize the likelihood of enemy logi undoing your good work.

That, incidentally, makes this Talwar remarkably easy for beginners to fly: skirmish away from your targets, lock the ones your FC tells you to, fire when you're told to do so. It couldn't be much more straight-forward.

Finally, there isn't much point to carrying other types of missiles. The Talwar gets a significant explosive damage bonus. Still, if you want to carry one reload of faction Mjolnirs, I won't stop you. Shield ships are traditionally pretty well-tanked against explosive damage and you might want to try the alternative.

Happy missile launching!

All Fits of the Week are intended as general guidelines only. You
may not have the skills needed for this exact fit. If you do not, feel
free to adjust the fit to suit to meet your skills, including using meta
3 guns and "best named" defenses and e-war. Ships can also be adjusted
to use faction or dead-space modules depending on the budget of the
pilot flying it. Each FOTW is intended as a general guide to introduce
you to concepts that will help you fit and to fly that particular type
of ship more aggressively and well.

That won't work; downgrading the MAPC to T1 puts you over-budget on powergrid, and the Azeotropic doesn't help with that, nor does it give enough free CPU for a T2 DC, even with perfect fitting skills, and the Calefaction rig will make the CPU problems even worse. The only way I can see to fit a T2 DC is by downgrading the launchers to meta-1 Malkuths, which will slow down the rate of fire and demand more frequent reloads.

My alt is training to become a pure Talwar pilot. His whole goal in life will be to be able to deliver a decent volley for cheap cost. Eventually I'll have him train into a Sabre, just because I'll already be most of the way there, but for now, I just want him to fly fast, hit hard, and be cheap to replace.

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